What was true of the Lord is also necessarily true of his followers today.  The path of obedience is the path of life which leads to God, in whose presence “…there is fullness of joy…” (RSV, Psalm 16:11).  So the Lord has told us, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (NRSV, Matthew 7:21, our emphasis).

For obedience strikes at the thing which is most precious to us – our liberty.  We then surrender to God our right to determine our attitude and outlook and to live our lives as we please, rather than as pleases him.  That means abandoning our own independent will and judgement – what we think, what we want, what we propose to do – and adopting instead what God thinks and wants and wishes us to do.

It is then that we find our true liberty, what St Paul calls “…the glorious liberty of the children of God” (RSV, Roman 8:21) – free to act as one is meant to act, free to be as one is meant to be, free to respond to the inner promptings of the Spirit of God: in a word, free to imitate God and in so doing be his own true children (see Romans 8:14; Ephesians 5:1).